


Search Lights Stare

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-18
Updated: 2011-07-18
Packaged: 2017-10-21 13:02:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/225464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe there's a fine line between being crazy and knowing the truth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Search Lights Stare

**Author's Note:**

> Title from lyrics in ‘I Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ (Avrutin feat. Charlie James) which was on repeat while I wrote this. This is another departure from my usual sort of fic.
> 
> Warnings: Murder, suicide and delusions.

The first conversation Gabriel ever has with Dean Winchester isn’t very exciting, but it’s definitely weird. He’s trying to work out where to ditch that morning’s pills—the nurses’ station is too risky, and it’s too dry for him to toss them in the garden—when one of the nurses sits the new guy down in the hard plastic chair beside him.

“I’ll only be a minute,” she says, smiling, but the guy shrinks back like she’s talking about skinning him alive. Her nametag reads _Ruby_.

There’s a set of unspoken rules at the facility: don’t drop the facade of being mentally incompetent for a second, even if you really think that the person isn’t going to tell; don’t get caught with anything you shouldn’t have; don’t hit on or goad the doctors and don’t, under any circumstances, get on the wrong side of Gabriel. It never takes anyone very long to learn the last one. Gabriel’s ready to walk past and never take any notice of this him when the stranger’s hand shoots out and his fingers curl around Gabriel’s wrist with surprising strength.

The only other person in the hall, Gordon (cut off people’s heads because he thought they were vampires, actually crazy) is smart enough to walk in the other direction. The last person who got on the wrong side of Gabriel, a frat-boy who claimed that he’d heard voices telling him to rape his classmates, who wasn’t really crazy, killed himself two days later.

“I know you,” the stranger says, fixing Gabriel with a stare that’s too steady, too clear for him to be on the half dozen different pills that are usually prescribed upon arrival to the hospital, but there’s an uncertainty in his movements that makes Gabriel suspect that he’s been sedated. He looks like he’s ten seconds away from passing out. “You killed people at a college and we tried to kill you. You made the guy think that he was dancing with an alien.”

The hint of a smile follows the last part, as lost as he seems.

Crazy. Totally, utterly crazy. Gabriel smiles. He loves the crazy ones. It’s so much easier to manipulate them. This one’s not bad looking either, green eyes and brown hair, freckles. He doesn’t look like any of the people Gabriel killed, and that’s nice. The worst thought you can have right after you decide that you wouldn’t mind sleeping with them is that you’ve killed someone who looks a lot like them.

Gabriel throws the pillow, complete with pills inside, on to the laundry cart that sits beside the door and turns to the guy just in time to hear Ruby call him Dean Winchester.

“I haven’t been out of here for five years,” he says. “You can’t have met me.”

Dean shakes his head. “I staked you, but you came back. You wouldn’t help us and I’m willing to bet that you know what’s going on here, don’t you? You know everything. Did you do it? Make up one of your realities and trap us in it. They think I’m crazy, Gabriel. It was you, or Zachariah’s stupid enough to try the same trick twice.” He looks towards Ruby, who’s signing the paperwork to say that Dean’s arrived, that he hasn’t harmed himself during the journey and he’s going to be here for who-knows-how-long. “You’re an angel.”

Cocking his head to one side and smirking, Gabriel says, “I’m no angel,” and walks away.

 

The word _angel_ strikes something in him and echoes in his head. Gabriel refuses to look back and wonders how crazy this one is, or if he’s faking it like half of the other people. Bela killed her abusive parents and blamed it on a demon; Ansem made his boss jump off a bridge and Max killed his family because they did nothing to stop the abuse that scarred him mentally and physically. Alastair slaughtered a building full of people, just because he wanted to and Lilith forced little kids to help her kill their families. Alastair, Lilith and Ansem are faking it; Bela and Max have something of a reason, and meds that are necessary.

Half of the people are crazy, and the other half are proof that there’s such a thing as pure evil.

Gabriel’s perfectly sane. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he never said that someone made him do it. That was what his lawyer (paid for by the family of a woman one of his ‘victims’ killed) said. Gabriel didn’t have to lie under oath: his lawyer did it all for him. All he did was avoid the truth. He killed people who deserved to die, and that’s what he said on the stand.

Guns were never his thing, Too unreliable, too loud, too easy to trace back. Use a cheap, store-bought knife and chances are most people won’t know the difference until it’s tested for blood and lights up like New York. Oops. The cop who put a photo of the knife down on the table told him that he should have cleaned it better. Gabriel hadn’t told him that he’d cleaned the ones he wanted to hide, the ones that

In retrospect, buying a matching set of knives was a bad idea. He only wanted to be linked to one of the killings, and they didn’t even manage that. They only got him for the ones who deserved what they got.

The only bright point was that it wasn’t too difficult to make everyone believe that he was insane. Drop a few hints about not being able to control it, that you thought that you were being sent a message to kill them, and they all fell for it; hook, line and sinker.

 

"You know, it's funny," Gabriel says, running his finger along the edge of the window, light striping across his face. The bars are the only way they're even allowed to have the windows open. High risk patients, and all that shit. The only thing that’s ever at risk is the sanity of the people who weren’t insane when they arrived.

From his position, curled up at the end of his bed, Dean doesn't raise his head, but he does ask, "What?"

"I've spent years pretending I'm crazy. They called me a sociopath, and then a psychopath, but I think they're just Googling everything now. But you, you're the real deal. The original in a pile of reproductions. The only person who should really be here." Gabriel's finger brushes the edge of the razor blade he hid in the tiny gap between the window sill and the wall, cutting a neat little line beside the other scars. He licks the blood from his finger without a second thought. "You're crazy. Full on cuckoo bananas. And I'm lucky enough to get a room with you."

It’s an old story, but not one they usually use on Gabriel. The words _overcrowding_ and _no money for an extension_ seep down the halls and through the walls too easily. Gabriel checks his hidden possessions and stops the blood with the crisp white sheets.

The only reason the overcrowding isn’t worse is because of the strangely high number of suicides. Gabriel likes that. Not only the deaths, but that they still call them _suicides_.

 

“You’re an archangel.” It’s the same old song. _You’re an angel. You’re good. You’re supposed to help us stop the apocalypse. Please help. We really need it. We’re going to die and the angels are going to win, and they’re going to wipe out everything._. “Gabriel, help us.”

Truth be told, Gabriel doesn’t give a shit if these angels wipe out the entire solar system. The world’s full of scum and the police are never fast enough. He was never fast enough, either, and one of the cops told him so when he was finally arrested.

 _”You can’t kill fast enough to stop them,” he whispered, and the chain of the handcuffs rattled when Gabriel tried to move away. “A little girl was raped three hours ago. A rentboy was beaten to death last night. Where were you then?”_

Gabriel rolls over to face the wall. “Not my problem, Deano.” He hates being called Deano, and it’s one of the few ways Gabriel can annoy him without hurting him. Gabriel thinks about hurting him. Dean talks too much, and it would be so easy to pin him to the bed and slide one of the razor blades through his tongue until he was spitting blood. The sheets tear easily; one quick rip and he could make him choke.

Dean laughs, for the first time since they met, and it sounds like the laugh of that guy who tried and failed to pretend to be crazy, and ended up getting shipped back to death row. It’s the laugh of someone who knows they’re going to die and is long past caring.

“You’re a coward here, too.”

“Go to Hell.”

“I’ve been.”

“Really? Was it a nice vacation?”

“I sold my soul for Sam. Alastair’s going to be happy when he finds out I’m back here.”

 _Alastair’s a fucking maniac,_ Gabriel doesn’t say, because Dean already knows from the way he smoothes non-existent creases in the sheets. “What did you do?”

Dean pulls at a loose thread at the edge of the sheet until it comes free. “They found Ruby’s knife in the motel room and arrested me for murder. The meatsuit was empty when the demon possessed it. Ruby tricked Sam in to letting Lucifer out. She deserved to die.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”

 

At least when he was off his meds, he was interesting and shut up once in a while. If Gabriel wakes up in the middle of the night because Dean’s freaking out about having killed people, he’s going to kill someone who doesn’t really deserve it. Again.

“Would you shut up for a minute?” he snaps, glaring at the night guard who peers through the window—fake plastic, too thick to be easily broken—before crawling down his bed. Dean’s in his usual place, curled up like a little kid again. _Blood all over the bed, and the bastard would never touch his wife or daughters again._ “You killed a few people, big deal! I killed dozens, and I don’t give a damn.”

“Someone killed my brother.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” The kid was killed by some guy suffering from sleep deprivation and having hallucinations. The nurses aren’t as quiet as they think they are, which usually works in Gabriel’s favour.

 

Dean whispers, “What if it’s real?” like it’s actually a possibility.

Gabriel doesn’t like to think of the years he doesn’t remember-- _never lived_ \--but he shrugs his shoulders, hand finding Dean’s pulse, steady and precious. Push down for long enough, compress the artery and he could kill him so quickly that no one would be able to tell until it was too late.

“What if it’s all in your head? What will you do then?”

The silence is his answer.

 

“There was someone there,” Dean tries, fingers curling around and digging in to the foam mattress. They can’t slit throats or cut their wrists with foam, you know, but someone swallowed so much that they choked, once. He didn’t want to swallow it, but Gabriel didn’t give him a choice. “There was a man in the warehouse.”

Gabriel thinks of sharp knives and bright lights. They drugged him once, only once because they didn’t like what they heard, but he remembers saying, “ _I taught Sam a lesson._ ”

He never killed someone called Sam. There was a Tony (a rapist with more STDs than Gabriel cared to think about, who delighted in passing them on); a Simon (a child molester who worked as a babysitter); a Jack (a murderer who got away with killing over a dozen people) and several more, but there was never a Sam.

“There was a man in the warehouse,” Dean repeats, but this time he adds, “and he called himself an angel.”

“Sure there was,” Gabriel wishes that they’d put the lights out, not because he likes it, but because he wanted to shut Dean up. Hopefully the meds will make him more stable, or at least quieter. There’s some half-formed fear behind every word he says, and Gabriel only likes fear when he’s the cause of it.

As if someone’s listening to his thoughts, the lights dim until they’re lying there in the dark, and Gabriel listens to Dean’s panicked breathing slow. It wouldn’t be too hard to make it stop for good. He’d just have to hold a pillow over his face, or maybe even just use his hand. Dean killed people, but he thought they really were evil, and that changes everything.

The almost silence is broken when Dean speaks again.

“You know, for a guy who says he loves his brothers, you really don’t give a shit, do you?”

That hurts more than it should: Gabriel doesn’t even have any brothers.

 

Lilith kills herself during the night. She cuts her wrists and bleeds to death before anyone realises what’s wrong. They’re all going to be confined to their rooms while the short search for whatever she used is carried out. It’s the same every time.

One of Gabriel’s razor blades is gone.

 

“Did she deserve it?” Dean asks when Gabriel slips back into the room, using the key he keeps hidden in the room.

“She killed families. She made the kids help. She pretended to be crazy.” The flooring, rubber stuff that feels stick in the summer peels back easily to reveal the loose boards beneath it. Gabriel pulls one up and hides the razor and lock pick with the rest of his stash: more blood stained razorblades and two knives. There’s a pile of old tablets in the corner, from when he first arrived, and he’s never taken the time to dispose of them. He probably never will. They’re mementos, of sorts, steps in the lessons that he learned. “Yeah, she deserved it. They all do. Those are the rules.”

“How’s what you’re doing any different?”

“I don’t do it to innocent people.” _Except that one time._ “I kill the ones who kill ” A pause. “Why do you care if she deserves it?”

“You pretended to be a trickster and thought that the people you went after deserved what they got. You kept killing them.”

Yeah, that sounds a lot like him, but with one big difference: Gabriel’s never intended to let anyone live and none of them ever have.

“You killed me, but you brought me back.”

This other Gabriel, this archangel, this trickster that Dean talks about, sometimes Gabriel thinks he’d like him. He’s brutal, cruel and twisted, and he seems like the type who needs a be taught a lesson, instead of teaching it. The other Gabriel doesn’t exist. None of it’s real.

The sun’s just beginning to rise, and it paints strange shades of orange and red across the sky, across Dean’s skin. Gabriel admires the faint glow his skin takes on, the warmth that might even be real. He leans back and waits for the nurses to shout for the doctors, for the alarms to blare. It won’t be long but, until then, he has some peace.

“I wouldn’t kill you,” he says, and Dean looks over at him.

 _I’d fuck you, but I wouldn’t kill you._

 

It happens in the small, hot room that passes for a dining room here. One minute Ruby’s leaning across a table, talking to Andy about his therapist having to cancel because of an emergency (family emergency, his daughter died in a car crash yesterday, Gabriel reads the news online) and the next minute she straightens up, pushing her hair away from her face and it’s like looking at pure evil in the twisted mess that, from the reactions of the others, looks like a normal human face.

 _”Before I went to Hell,” Dean said just before he started taking the pills, “I could see what demons really look like. Ruby’s one ugly bitch under that meatsuit.”_

Gabriel digs his fingernails in to the soft rubber that’s around the edges of the plastic chair.

 

Gabriel tells himself that switching his meds with Dean’s ones is only his latest source of amusement. With Lilith dead and Alastair possibly being moved to another facility after attacking one of the nurses, he’s fast running out of any entertainment. Even Gordon, with his hair trigger temper and love of going for throats, isn’t very fun now.

He swallows a few of Dean’s pills, but tosses the others.

As soon as he’s sure that the meds are out of Dean’s system, Gabriel crawls across the small space between the two beds and whispered, “Tell me about Gabriel. Tell me about everything.”

 

There was foster care and house in the middle of nowhere; a man who smelled like beer and wanted him to call him _Daddy_ like it meant something. Before that there was a bright light and he was just a little kid who woke up in the middle of a field. He ran and it felt like he’d been running for years.

People used to joke about him being an angel they found out that he was the one stabbing the child molesters, the rapists and the general scumbags. Then they called him an angel of vengeance. He’s never liked that. He’s nothing special, just someone who’s smart enough to see how terrible people can be, and taken action.

“That’s why they put me in here. I’ve got fan clubs that would go to every jail in the country, but stick me in the nuthouse and they’re too scared to come anywhere near me.” He got through the firewall on the computers on his first day, though, and Gabriel’s got enough people on the outside that an escape would be not only possible, but easy if he wanted to do it. He’s not quite sure why he never has. He usually has more than enough to work with on the inside that the outside is boring by comparison, but too many people are genuinely crazy nowadays.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t say anything when, half asleep and half gone in his own descriptions of people he and his brother saved, of the angels who’re out to get them (except Castiel, and maybe Gabriel, they’re not so sure about him right now) he slides his hand up Dean’s thigh. Dean falls silent, mouth closing and Gabriel starts to move his hand away, but Dean grabs his wrist before he can.

“I still don’t trust you,” he hisses, pushing him down on to the sheets, fingers digging into his skin until Gabriel knows that there are going to be bruises there tomorrow. Small, blue-green and painless until something or someone presses against them.

 _You’d be an idiot if you did,_ Gabriel doesn’t say, but he lets him take control.

 

Dean likes it rough, likes to fuck instead of make love, and that suits Gabriel just fine. He’s got not time for the sweet whispers of devotions some of the others whisper about (the walls aren’t that thin, the doors are locked, but Gabriel has keys to everywhere and the security cameras haven’t worked since six months after he arrived) while they fuck with their hands, their mattresses, their pillows (which is disgusting because the sheets only get changed every two days). They fuck in the middle of the night, when everyone else is asleep and the nurses are less likely to stumble upon them and split them up.

Dean likes to scratch Gabriel’s back (“ _Fucking angels_ ”) until he leaves marks that take days to fade. If he gets a surprise strip search, he’s going to be fucked, and not in the good way.

They’re not supposed to touch each other like this. If they’re found out, they’re going to be in trouble, and Gabriel’s never going to find out the truth. If they get found out, it all falls apart.

It falls apart anyway.

 

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the sanest of them all?”

It stops being funny when he accidentally says, “I love my brothers,” during one of the therapy sessions. The doctor’s forehead creases and he frowns, flicking through the notes. _Zachariah’s_ convinced that Gabriel’s going to become a functioning member of society. Gabriel really wants to tell him that it isn’t going to happen.

“According to the police officers who investigated your parents’ murders, you were an only child. You were never placed with families who had other children. You don’t have brothers, you’ve never had brothers.”

 _Dean says I do,_ sounds so simple in his head, but he knows that it’s crazy, that maybe he’s going as crazy as Dean is. Instead it’s, “I had parents?”

Zachariah acts like he earned his degree, but he flounders the rest of the way through the session, eventually asking his assistant for help. The kid’s bored, most likely one of the kids working to earn money for college.

It’s not a real mirror, anyway.

 

There was a girl in a field, eyes wide and scared, fingers clutching at a knife and her blood was hot against his skin and red against the green, green grass.

 _She didn’t deserve to die,_ a voice in the back of Gabriel’s head whispers, but he bites the shell of Dean’s ear until he can taste blood and pushes it away. “There are no such things as angels and demons.”

“I liked you more when you were a liar,” and there’s the scrape-dig of nails across Gabriel’s skin, with Dean trying to draw blood, “at least then you knew you were lying.”

 

It’s been almost eight months when Gabriel overhears one of the doctors talking about _Dean Winchester_ and a _specialist facility_ and he cuts his hand open on the pocket knife he stole from one of the lockers. The blood drips down on to the pristine white sheet, but Gabriel takes no notice of it.

It’s not even the rushed gropes between the nurses checking on them that Gabriel likes, it’s that sometimes Dean’s claims almost make sense. How easily Lilith got those children to kill their families. How Alastair tortured so many people. How Max killed his family. Even Bela could be sane.

The only reason Dean isn’t responding to the treatment is because he hasn’t been taking the meds. All he has to do is give Dean the right pills, take his own, and this whole problem goes away like every other thing Gabriel decides to get rid of. But Gabriel’s never going to forget any of it, especially not Ruby’s face.

There are two paths stretching out in front of him, and Gabriel’s never been one to take the simple path.

Hours later, Gabriel jostles Dean awake and whispered, “Hey, Winchester, you want to find out if all that stuff’s real?”

 

The drying blood on Gabriel’s hands make his palms itch and there’s the constant beat of _you killed her, you killed her, oh, fuck, you killed her, she didn’t deserve to die, you killed an innocent girl, youkilledaninnocentgirl_ until Gabriel slams his palm against the dashboard.

“She tried to stop us,” he whispers, and he can still feel the knife in his hand and see the way he throat sliced open easily under it. There’s blood drying on his face, as well, and he wipes it off with his sleeve. There are no knives under the floor in their room, but he left the razorblades.

In the passenger seat, Dean starts to give him directions.

“Stull cemetery. I don’t think it’s far from here, and that’s where we’ll be able to break out of it. They didn’t think I’d remember, but I do. You can’t pull the same trick twice, Zachariah. Not on me.”

Zachariah’s the therapist who tries to get through to the patients here; Zachariah’s one of the guys Dean said he’d killed, some insurance salesman he stabbed a few days before he was caught. Gabriel tries not to think about how they’re looking for a dead man.

 

There are three names that Gabriel recognises on the gravestones. Mary Winchester. John Winchester. Sam Winchester. Three names Dean says a lot.

Dean touches his fingers to the letters of each of the names in turn, pulling away the small amount of vegetation that’s starting to grow around the bottom couple of inches of the gravestones.

“The demon killed them, but I killed the demon.”

The laptop Dean stole is full of bookmarks about events he claims to have been a part of. The printer’s back at the library, but Dean clutches a wad of print-outs like they’re a lifeline.

“Sam let Lucifer out of his cage less than a year ago, but he didn’t mean it. Ruby tricked him. She made him think that what he was doing was right, and it was her blood that made him do it.”

Sam Winchester’s date of death is almost three years ago. Gabriel digs at the dried blood under his nails and thinks about motel rooms he’s never stayed in. They’ve always got some stupid theme.

 

There’s no sex involved now. Dean’s desperation to touch a life that exists only in his head is fading because he can stand in front of graves and claim that it’s all a lie without someone telling him that he’s wrong—Gabriel keeps his mouth _shut_ —while the news flashes their photos up and calls them _dangerous._

He’s starting to feel dangerous.

Gabriel never thought he’d miss the medication that he hardly ever bothered to take. Maybe it was the meds (or maybe Dean’s meds, since he took them more often than he took his own) or maybe it was just being cut off from _normal_ people, he’d almost stopped thinking about how many people should die .Outside, surrounded by the exhaust fumes and people going about their normal lives, he starts to think about the slide of a knife through flesh again.

One of his first therapists stood up in court and said that Gabriel could have killed anyone, and that it was the luck of the draw that he decided to go after criminals.

“There’s somewhere else,” Dean clutches at threads and types a new location in to the GPS—new car, stolen while the owner was in the gas station flirting with a girl young enough to be his daughter—and looks up at Gabriel, expectant.

They’re both criminals, but Gabriel tries not to think about that.

 

It’s not like they’ve got anywhere else to go.

They still to the back roads, where people are less likely to take the time to look at their faces, where there are fewer people to risk it. Cheap motel rooms with ugly themes: whoever thought that using cacti as inspiration for an entire room should be shot.

On the way, Dean keeps searching for people. He writes down lists of people who don’t exist: _Anna Milton. Jimmy Novak. Amelia Novak. Claire Novak._

 

“He should be here,” Dean says, throwing open one of the dilapidated closets and throwing out old books that smell like they’ve been in there for years. Gabriel sidesteps a more recent phonebook, but picks it up and flips through it. “Bobby’s lived here for years. He owns the salvage yard. He wouldn’t just leave without telling us.”

No one’s lived here for a long time. The salvage yard is full of rusty and burnt out cars; the house has fallen in to disrepair and the grass hasn’t been cut for years.

“Simmons, Simons, Simpson, Sittet.” Gabriel rips out the page and thrusts it at Dean. “No Singer in the state, Dean. Face it: Bobby Singer doesn’t exist and he never did.”

Dean screws up the page and throws it to the side, to the closet full of spiders and books, expression pained.

“That Impala we passed on the way in here? That’s mine, but it isn’t burnt out and Bobby would never have left it here. Somebody made him. Lucifer or Michael, one of your dick brothers. Maybe it was you, you and your sick games. It’s not funny anymore, Gabriel.”

“Oh, for-ˮ Gabriel throws the phonebook at Dean, who only just manages to duck to avoid it. It hits the wall with a sad sort of thump, its pages scattering as the spine buckles. “It’s not real! None of it is. You saw the graves back there; your brother’s been dead for years. You’re crazier than I am. At least I only believe you, you actually created this mess.”

It’s not the first time Dean’s grabbed him, but it’s the first time that the move’s really been unwanted. Gabriel shakes him off, staring at the smear of blood left on his wrist from the cut in Dean’s hand. The response on the tip of his tongue vanishes when he hears a car pull up outside, and he and Dean both freeze before they look out the window.

There’s a cop standing by the car, peering down at the licence plate as he talks in to his radio. Dean leaves the room, rattling something in the kitchen, but Gabriel ignores him because this isn’t good, this isn’t good at all. The last thing they need is someone tracing the car and finding out that they were seen in the area shortly before the theft, putting the pieces together and realising that this is where they are.

“Gabriel,” Dean hisses, pulling him back towards some of the floorboards he ripped up earlier and Gabriel wants to ask if he’s seriously thinking what he thinks he’s thinking. The space is small, probably only four feet high and less than six feet long, with pieces of wood in odd places.

Gabriel opens his mouth to protest, but the front door clicks open and Dean pushes him in, crawling in after him and pulling the boards back over the top.

 

It’s been hours, and Gabriel’s legs are beginning to cramp up from the contorted position they’re in, dizziness beginning to take over if he thinks too much or tries to move too fast. Not that there’s much room to move with Dean half behind him and half under him, one arm around Gabriel’s waist to hold him down. Gabriel doesn’t tell Dean that he’s not going anywhere.

“How much air’s in here?”

Dean clamps a hand over Gabriel’s mouth and nose, and Gabriel thrashes, fighting on instinct alone. Somewhere above them, the footsteps are back. They’re heavier, though, someone else, and there’s a smell there as well. Gas.

 _Fuck._ The kitchen must have been where the gas was connection. _What have you done?_

“Take us back, you son of a bitch. I don’t care if you remember, you can still do it. Just _take us back._ ”

If the lack of oxygen doesn’t kill them, Dean’s got a lighter in his hand: Gabriel can feel it pressing into his side, and it won’t be hard for him to light the whole house up. He scratches at Dean’s hands and arms because he doesn’t want to die here, not when he’s never done anything to deserve this, when he’s actually innocent this time.

“The perfect witness protection programme,” Dean snarls. “Even you don’t know who you are. If you’re as human as you look, this can kill you. If it isn’t you, I don’t think Zachariah, Michael or Lucifer will let their brother die.”

 _There was a girl in the field, and he thought he’d locked the car doors, but he can’t have because she got out and screamed, “Daddy!” when she saw what he’d done. She ran at him and Gabriel didn’t mean it, he swears he didn’t meant it, but he went to push her away and he was still holding the knife and she was innocent, she was five years old and she’d never done anything to deserve dying like that._

Gabriel relaxes and lets his hands drop to his sides, even as Dean presses harder, even when his lungs start to burn. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. Bobby Singer’s not going to be able to get them out of this and back to Sam Winchester and Gabriel’s brother Castiel. Bobby Singer doesn’t live here, and the other Winchesters have been dead for years. Gabriel’s never had a brother. Zachariah’s just a therapist; Sam and John Winchester have been dead for years. It’s all bullshit, and Gabriel’s as crazy as Dean for believing it.

It’s not real, it never was and, while Gabriel isn’t behind this, he’s done plenty of other things that are much worse.

The darkness gives way to a soft light, even as every cell in his body screams for oxygen, and the last thing Gabriel hears is Dean whispering, “Sammy?”

Gabriel thinks he hears someone say, “Dean?” just as he hears the quiet _snick_ of the lighter.


End file.
